For 2: Any reason why your developers can't use VirtualBox with the free IE-test VM images that Microsoft provides? I don't know if the license allows them to run on a non-MS OS, but you can at the very least have several of them run on a single box and enable RDP in VirtualBox.

That "single box" needs to be able to support enough instances for our entire development team. This is more hardware and IT maintenance costs. Also, if we are doing network maintenance and wifi goes down, developers have to stop working.